Daniel Sperling told an audience at the University of Colorado Boulder that the answer to fixing the country’s mounting transportation ills likely rests in how regulators approach their newfound grasp on prevailing innovations, suggesting local leaders lean in to incentivizing ride-sharing and alternative transit options to spur change.

“I want to start off by saying we’re doing a poor job on transportation overall” Sperling, the founding director of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, said Wednesday at a transportation summit hosted by Louisville-based Commuting Solutions. “I wouldn’t have been so strong in making those statements a few years ago because we didn’t have as many options.”

Despite the innovation explosion — micro-mobility, electric scooters, ride-hailing services and the expansion of bicycle-friendly infrastructure across cities —transit behaviors in general are backsliding, he said.

Across the country, he said, vehicles are getting bigger and more expensive — Americans pay on average $8,000 per year for every car they own — congestion is getting worse and greenhouse gases are lifting into the atmosphere at a ballooning rate because of it.

Moreover, he said, carpool lanes around the country have mostly failed despite their proliferation, a fact particularly resonant in Boulder, where roughly 80% of cars traveling into the city have only one person in them.

Data provided by the city in March showed that of the approximately 104,000 jobs in Boulder, people who live outside city limits fill more than half. Meanwhile, between 1994 and 2018, traffic entering and exiting the city increased 35% , the same study found.

About 28% of the city’s emissions are attributed to transportation, according to city data.

While the Great Recession saw vehicle usage decrease nationwide — a statistic paired with assumptions from researchers that they had solved the transit issue — the economy’s revival in recent years has seen the trends come back with a vengeance.

“We thought we figured out the key,” Sperling said. “We were wrong.”

We really screwed up and now we have the innovations to do much better,” Sperling added, making his case for how both individual commuters and local governments can improve the system.

While suggesting “automated vehicles will dominate eventually,” the answer likely lies in how successful both the private and public sector are in getting people to embrace using the technology cooperatively.

Many consider “the most likely scenario with (automated vehicles) is that people will buy one and use it to replace the conventional vehicle they have now … that would be a disaster,” he said, suggesting the automation revolution will only see people spending more time in their cars, not less.

Real change exists in the incentivizing of ride-sharing, similar to how people use services like Uber and Lyft, he said. Though getting people to catch on has proven difficult.

Commuters’ aversion to ride-sharing reaches beyond monetary reasons, he said, pointing to humans’ basic need for privacy and safety concerns. He suggested cities could start by pushing the prices for services down, such as making ride-sharing shuttle options from the airport free, and charging higher costs and making it inconvenient to ride solo.

“Cost could be very low but we’re going to need a lot of policy and incentives to make those changes,” he added.

The second answer to solving the current transit woes may exist in providing choice, he said, which could come with better bus services and infrastructure, though most readily will involve local leaders’ embrace of emerging innovations.

Sterling warned city leaders against bristling — as most local governments do, he said — at alternative transit options like the electric scooters that dot the sidewalks of major cities.

“Once you create choice the next thing you can do is adopt these pricing policies that are otherwise taboo,” he said. “More pooling plus choice is key to a sustainable future.”